Also from Han Hoogerbrugge is this interactive narrative, Hotel, about a scientist named Dr. Doglin who drugs his patients to perform tests on their response to freak accident injuries. Dr. Doglin is the founder of Preconstruction, the company behind the research being done in this area, and whose mission statement includes the treatment, and eventual prevention, of freak accidents.

Each chapter, or episode, of the interactive fiction is composed entirely in Flash and includes animations, voice-overs, some text and sounds from which an emergent narrative is constructed. Each episode is comprised of several vignettes, or 'rooms' of the hotel, where the story unfolds. Simply click on the various characters and objects in a room to reveal more about them.

Progress through the rooms of an episode is controlled by a timer that counts down for each. When the timer reaches zero, the player is automatically taken to the next room. The timer interface includes buttons to 'stop' the timer to spend more time with a particular scene, or 'jump' that immediately takes you to the next room. An auto-hiding navigation bar on the left edge of the Flash window allows you to jump to any room in the story.

With six (6) episodes completed, and more chapters yet to go, Hotel is still a work in progress, and one that consumes all of Han's time. It is quite an elaborate piece of work, and the Flash components of the tale are impressively done. Hotel will probably not be enjoyable for younger folks, as it contains a mature theme and situations, and some nudity. And it is not a game. However, it is of a point-and-click variety that Web surfers just can't seem to get enough of these days.

This was just a game about torture, fear, and infatuation/obsession. There are a thousand of these. A game with the purpose to be perverse should not fraud "masterful" or fool anybody. Oscar Wild wrote an essay on this subject.

okay... i played this a couple of nights ago, and i'm still trying to put it all together. i'm going under the (possibly and probably wrong) assumption that there's a deeper meaning to the game. i replayed the game several times to try to pick up on things i missed before. i looked up the abba song online. i read the wikipedia article on doppelgangers. and for the life of me, i still don't get it! for the last two days, i've been pondering the significance of the mickey mouse ears, car and plane crashes, masochistic butlers, naked clowns, and that cryptic ending. i know that in all honesty, the game was probably created for the intent of surrealism, and it's highly unlikely there was a true meaning to the game, but i'm still trying to find it in there somewhere...

Ok. i think we can all understand the story line in hotel until the end.

we know that the both doctors are alike and evil to some degree. (since they are together in the end).
The experiments on those victims (including on the inspector) are obviously being exaggerated (i still don't understand what those pills are).
the clowns doesn't really much tie with this story, but he seems somehow knows what fate lies ahead for dr. goldin. (as the story suggested)
the narrator definitely used some weird ways to show his work and this pretty much complicates everything. (srry but i don't know about the author and i have no idea why that micky mouse hat is related).
The ending is more bizarre than i could possible imagin. when he stated that it will be a happy ending (or the story will go on) and a nuclear core sucked everything inside (i am sure that's not dr.goldin's experiment) and the windows automatically shutted down right after surely leaded us to wonder.
my conclusions-
1. mr.fisher is good, and he distracted the doctors to make a melt down in Globin's unfinished experiment lab. (happy ending)
2. the story isn't finished, the author temporarily made up an alternative ending.
3. like most of the movies, the whole point is to attract and lure the viewers (evidently not much made any sense in there, but got your attention).
Or simply put "made you watch".

(i'm writing this response from memory, so forgive me if i get a detail or two wrong.)

for some reason, i feel the need to rebutt against stargazer's comments. first off, if i remember the quote from the end, i interpreted it more along the lines of "if you want a good ending, you gotta know when to stop." which implied to me that stopping right there would be a good ending, but going on would... well... i also don't think that it was a temporary end, because this was from over two years ago. i think that if it were a temporary end, he would have put in the permanent end by now.

since my original comment back in october, i've been coming back to the hotel occasionally and thinking it through a little bit more, a bit at a time, and really, i've started to wonder if there is no point to the thing...

what if it really is purely for the sake of surrealism? if you look at the other entry on here by hoogerbugge, flow (linked at the top of the page), that one really seems surrealistic as well... and some of the other animations on his personal site (the particular one i'm thinking of, i can't remember the name of at this moment) are bizarre too...

so what if it is all made-up mumbo-jumbo? what if this is just the result of a series of bizarre dreams after a few too many nights on the sauce? i'd say that i have no choice but to congratulate mr. hoogerbugge for creating such an amazingly stunning environment for an interactive story. such immersive fiction really takes loads of skill gushing out one's ears. i've decided i'm not going to let this little drama bother me anymore, but rather bask in the awe this game has given me for the past nine months. thank you, han, you've definitely hit the head on the hammer and provided a truly entertaining experience.

They died. Goldin and Doglin are the same person. In the very last episode, if you take the ball and scroll to the very far left there's a message about doppelgangers. Goldin/Doglin are anagrams. Anyway, the message that was left was that doppelgangers are an omen of death.

Yeah, I thought a lot like Erik on this about the ending, but here's my add (not long):

The two doctors are perhaps halves of the same person, and the whole thing is happening inside Mr. Whoever's mind. The one half was gifted with knowing the cure, not what happened. The other half caused the accidents and gave no cure. Only does only good, one does only harm: Put them together, one person hurts and heals the same people. Somehow though they split, from some traumatic event, shown symbolically when the doctor gave up on himself as a patient in the comic. If he had seen himself first, he might've fought fate unsuccessfully, but as his gift was knowing the outcome, he only knew it was a hopeless case and didn't even bother trying to fix the patient; himself.

read the newspaper articles that doctor goldin was reading while he was waiting for his test? A car crash, a plane crash, a motorcycle crash(two died), and a guy getting run over by a train? Flip = Car crash; Imp = Plane crash. Think back to the recovery room. There were three other people who we didn't know about. Two guys = motorcycle crash; Guy who's entire torse was in bandages = Run over by a train. I think these are just a *tiny* bit more than coincidences, don't you? Then what of Princess? What happened to her body? The guy who appears in the door in the final comic (Dr. Goldin's last patient) confuses me a bit too. As to Dr. Goldin/Doglin, I can't figure it out.

I think that the two men are the same person. I remember the Scene where doctor Godlin is looking at himself in the hospital, and it says "the one patient Dr. Godlin refused to help."

I think basically the story is of the doctor and how he went mad in his own way. He lost his special ability because he was willing to help all of his patients but he wasn't willing to help himself (in other words, deal with his own problems and madness). Therefore, his madness got in the way of his practice and he continued down the spiral of insanity.

I look at it as kind of a journey into his world and a look into his conflict of coping with himself--all of himself. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I see it.

That is just amazing. Though it was a bit confusing because i'm only 13, I have an idea that the clown was behind it all.... okay maybe not. Anyway, it seems like Dr. Doglin is Dr. Godlin and that the patient he couldn't save was himself, and it was a bit creepy how

the clown appeared at the end and waved, then it flashed and the window disappeared

I'm loving the comments and all of the insight. I played this game at 4am on zero sleep and, let me tell you, it freaked me out big time. I felt a tad hysterical and was simultaneously baffled and amused by all of it. I especially loved part 1, scene 4 where the guy takes a drink and spits it out with a "blah" sound and a small explosion. BRAVO! to the maker(s) of this highly entertaining game. :)

Ted ...without wanting to make you look/feel stupid
the clown is just counting down 5.4.3.2.1.........beeep.....You may not have had sound but thats what the audio was saying too
(not the whole Ted...without etc just the countdown bit)

Beam ...I thought it was very good indeed

gets a full 5 cuppas from me
(cups of tea)

p.s. I think everyone who comments is really sweet....some sites (I no longer visit) are full of rubbish and expletives.....I think you are all lovely
Jay is not bad either (minxy wink)

The impression i got when going through the episodes and the comics was of the old 50's version of twilight zone. what i think happened was that they are two different people, while simultaneously being one and the same--in different dimensions. stop me if i'm getting too complicated, and reaching too far for this, but i think that a hole opened somewhere between dimensions, and a time rift happened at the same...moment. to put it in a linear way, goldin loses his touch because he has...himself as a patient and refuses to operate. in search of his gift, he answers doglin's ad and goes to Hotel. doglin's experiment leaves goldin wounded beyond repair, and he goes to the hospital. where he himself, refuses to operate...on himself. which causes the loss of his gift. to stop the neverending cycle, the clown appears. who is the clown? who knows. my interpretation is some sort of presence who lives outside the loop, who knows all and sees all, and possibly influences things somehow beyond our understanding. this i got from, "don't blame the clown. i'm just a clown." from when he flashes in the restaurant. it sounded...ironic to me. with the clown altering events, this time when doglin meets goldin something changes, like meeting yourself in time, or another dimension--causing the unstable collapse of the dimension and/or timeline, and creating an entirely new dimension and/or timeline where none of these events ever happened in the first place. as for the quote, it's a sad ending if you stop with the loop, going and going and going. but if you keep going, the ending becomes happy, b/c if the clown's interference made the rift in time and space never happen, then goldin never loses his touch, and continues to save the save-able. doglin--well he's just evil, and his awful experiments will continue to his downfall. but aren't we taught from very young that the good shall always triumph over evil?

I absolutely love this game. It's brilliant on so many different levels. The fact that the ending is ambiguous and mysterious means that I keep on going back and playing it, which is a good thing because the fact that I want to go back and make sure I didn't miss anything means it has a good replay value.

I really like all of the ideas. Johnny's is especially interesting, almost a sci-fi take on the story. But the surreal imagery makes me think the story is much more symbolic. Here's my interpretation:

As someone else has said earlier, the characters in the restaurant are dead. The weird actions they are doing corresponds to how they die. Go back and play through the restaurant sections thinking of that, and you will see that the game makes slightly more sense because of that.

The Hotel itself... it could be some form of purgatory perhaps? Where the people that have done wrong, but not too much wrong, in their life, are trapped here to make up for the sins that they did. The Clown could therefore represent Death. Not necessarily a harbinger of death, but more of an omen. The clown seems to be there before somehthing terrible happens. Whether he makes the bad things happen or is trying to warn them is unknown.

Continuing with the religious idea, Dr. Doglin could therefore be Satan. He seems to epitomise everything evil and wrong. As for Dr. Goldin? He could be God. Not necessarily be god, but represents Good, by trying to help the people that Doglin has harmed.

The interesting point here is that although Doglin and Goldin are so different, they are the same person. This could show the conflict between Good/Evil, but also showing the grey area in between, that good and evil may not be so different from each other after all.

The ending? Pretty grim, I suppose, if you look at it from this viewpoint. In the end, neither really win, and both are destroyed. This can be seen as a victory for good, since Dr. Doglin has been destroyed, but also as a terrible loss, because Dr. Goldin, a man that had the gift of being able to know what is wrong with people, was destroyed as well. So it's neither good nor bad.

That's my view, it's mostly metaphorical and assumptions, but this game seems rather symbolic, so I don't think it should be taken too literally.

Last post today.
After reading more comments, the answer looks obvious to me. It seems that the point is like 'modern art' It's not what the creator wanted to say to us, but what we say about the piece that gives it meaning.
That is, the purpose of it is for us to try and interpret it. It's meant merely to be talked about and puzzled over.

That having been said, I tip my metaphorical hat to the creator of this game. Even with that as the intention, it's a LOT easier said than done. I could try to do the same, but I'd either end up replicating something else I'd seen or wind up with a cheesy and sentimental piece of tripe.
So all in all, an excellent work.

I know that this is an older game, but I just played it for the first time.

I thought the underlying message in this game was fairly obvious.

An ER doctor who prided himself in being the best at his job realized, after a car crash, he was not able to save everyone. In the comics we find out that he tried to save a man, but was unable to so then went home and fell into a depression and didn't return to work.

He also becomes a little crazy. In his psychotic persona, he begins to perform experiments on people that mimic the real life situations he encountered as an ER doc in which his patients didn't survive. A car crash, a plane crash (we learn about those during the newspaper headlines)....However this time he is trying to "save" them in his own crazy way..self redemption?

He once was a God and then became Dog

The surreal atmosphere is tribute to his insanity.

The ending is open to interpretation but I think that he is finally accepting reality,(and perhaps responsibility) and merging his split personality.

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